IN AN EARLY STAGE OF HYDROPHOBIA. 529 
or the knife. In such a malady, where legitimate hope scarcely 
comes, no means which offer the slightest shadow of success 
should be neglected. No great dependence, perhaps, can be 
placed on such a measure: the nervous irritation is too general 
and too great for any intensity of inflammation which may be set 
up in the bitten part to remove or even to alleviate. It is not, 
however, the valuable, the powerful principle of counter-irritation 
which alone is here concerned. This is a disease of empoison- 
ment: it is produced by a certain virus, which, either acting upon 
or absorbed from the tissue on which it lay, has deranged the 
whole constitution. 
How do facts stand here ? The writer of this leader may, 
perhaps, be forgiven for speaking in his own person. In the 
course of a long practice, a great many dogs bitten by others 
supposed to be rabid have come under his care. Where the 
wound could be discovered, the caustic was invariably applied 
with severity proportioned to the nature of the case. Very 
many dogs, notwithstanding this application of the caustic— 
whether it failed, or whether, in an animal covered with hair, 
some other wounds had escaped the most careful search—became 
rabid and died. Others, suspected to have been bitten, but on 
whom not a scratch could be discovered, were put under con¬ 
finement, and a considerable proportion of them became rabid. 
It is extremely difficult to discover a slight wound on an animal 
thickly covered with hair. 
Possessing opportunities for obtaining some knowledge of this 
disease which in those days fell to the lot of few veterinary 
practitioners, and urged and determined by circumstances, with 
which the public have nothing to do, to aim at some slight por¬ 
tion of distinction in one branch, at least, of his profession, he 
was industrious in his accumulation of facts. He was anxious 
to detect the earliest symptom of the malady ; and the earliest 
in most of his patients was an eager licking or gnawing of the 
originally bitten part in the dogs on which he had operated, and 
of some place, varying in different cases, in those in whom the 
wound had escaped detection—proving the local origin of the 
disease; ascertaining the precise period when the previously inert 
VOL. VIII. 4 c 
